Rick Griffin, the creator of the webcomic Housepets!, has written an interesting article about the proposed U.S. bill HR 669 which seeks to ban all non-native species from the United States. If you live in the U.S. and think that banning hamsters might not really stimulate the economy, don’t want to have another personal right taken away by the nanny state, or oppose the conviction of a static nature whose current state has to be preserved at all costs, the website NO HR 669 offers more information how you can get active against the bill.

75 years ago, on 12 April 1934, forest superintendent Wilhelm Freiherr Sittich von Berlepsch released four raccoons (two males and two pregnant females) into the German countryside at the Edersee reservoir in the north of Hesse. He released them two weeks before receiving permission from the Prussian hunting office to “enrich the fauna”, as the request of their owner, the poultry farmer Rolf Haag, stated.

In the attached photograph you can see Rolf Haag with one of his pet raccoons. I don’t know, however, if it’s one of those released to the wild.

Rolf Haag and one of his raccoons, photo taken by Christoph Haag

A second population was established in East Germany in 1945 when 25 raccoons escaped from a fur farm at Wolfshagen to the east of Berlin after an air strike. Today, the estimated number of raccoons in the whole of Germany is between 200,000 and 400,000 animals. Contrary to popular belief, the raccoon experts Ulf Hohmann and Frank-Uwe Michler, who currently leads the research project „Project Raccoon“ (German) in the Müritz National Park, have found no evidence that a high population density of raccoons has had negative effects to the biodiversity of the examined areas.

Sandra and Woo and all my other websites have been the targets of a large-scale hacking attack. The attack apparently involved an automatic script which inserted malicious code into all source files on the webspace. To fix the problem, I have changed my passwords, removed all files on the webspace and re-uploaded my local backup. The forum and my other sites should be back online during the next week.

If you have visited Sandra and Woo or any of my other websites on Wednesday or Thursday you should check your system with anti-virus and anti-spyware software.

I want to say thank you to all the people who were interested in the editor position. It’s never easy to make a decision between several apparently equally qualified candidates. But now let’s welcome Sarah Dunphy (Neveko) to our small team. She is an English major at the Iowa State University and should thus be able to point out all obvious grammar mistakes in the dialog of the comic.

Please do not apply anymore!

The subtle differences between “sunning” and “sun bathing” (see the comments of today’s strip) are… uhm… subtle. Since I’m not a native English speaker, I’m just not able to get such linguistic nuances, even after consulting a dictionary and the Google search.

Because of this, we are looking for an editor who has a second look at the dialog of the next comic strips before their publication. For example, the editor should be able to tell me that it’s better to use “will have been gone” instead of “will be gone” in a complicated sentence. To make it easier to discuss such things, I will create an internal forum. Of course the editor will get credit on the About page of our website.

If you are a native speaker with good language skills and interested in the position, you can write a comment or send an e-mail to novil@gmx.de. Considering the small amount of new dialog each week, it’s really not much work to do. But you should be reliable nonetheless.